Philadelphia Stories (Wed., June 14, 9 p.m., WYBE-TV) A treasure trove of Philly-themed documentaries and short subjects, WYBE's weekly series scouts the city all summer long. The fifth installment kicks off with Warren Bass and Zilan Munus' At the Wall, a boisterous recollection of the fight to integrate Girard College. The heart of the midlength documentary is a lively reunion of the activists who protested the school's segregationist policies. "We all were drunk with freedom," recalls Kenneth Salaam, then named Kenneth Smith, and known to his comrades as Freedom Smitty. With outrage undimmed by the intervening decades, the protesters recall being run off the sidewalk outside the school's stone walls by cops on motorcycles, an order they're convinced came directly from then-Police Commissioner Frank Rizzo. (The statement, which meets with approval around the room, is followed by a flurry of escalating conspiracy theories that the filmmakers neither confirm nor deny.) If At the Wall is short on legwork—apart from the one set of interviews, the research is entirely archival—it's rife with fascinating details, like the 1954 opinion by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court which held that Stephen Girard's will, limiting admission to "poor white male orphans," was protected by the Constitution, since "a man's prejudices are part of his liberty." At the Wall is paired with Shelley Barry's Whole: A Trinity of Being, a series of short impressionistic documentaries relating the aftermath of a gunshot wound that left Barry partially paralyzed and breathing through a hole in her throat.

A Family Finds Entertainment

First Person Festival (Fri.-Sun., June 9-11) The First Person Festival moves into its second weekend with a double-bill titled "Tricks of the Trade" (Fri., 7 p.m., Arts Bank). In Abel Raises Cain, Jenny Abel profiles her father Alan, who makes a living (or tries to) pulling the wool over the media's eyes. In the late 1950s, Abel, writing as one G. Clifford Prout, founded the Society for Indecency to Naked Animals, whose goal was to shield delicate eyes from the spectacle of animal nudity. (That the deliberately askew prepositions in SINA's name suggest exactly the opposite was, Abel says, intended as a red flag.) With a 1959 appearance on the Today show, for which a then-unknown Buck Henry took Abel's place as the prudish Prout, the hoax reached epic proportions: Abel claims one elderly rich lady wrote SINA a check for $40,000. (It was returned.) Later, he snookered the New York Times into printing his obituary, and, at the 2000 Republican Convention, launched a campaign against public breast-feeding.

So why would Abel pursue a career bound to incur enmity from the very people he presumably agrees with? (The anti-breast-feeding campaign prompts some particularly vicious voicemails.) The movie only begins to hint. Gracelessly made and scored with nudge-nudge elevator music that fruitlessly underlines the wackiness of Abel's schemes (if the horse in pants doesn't do it, nothing will), Abel Raises Cain only scratches its subject's surface—not surprisingly given how rarely parents and children truly understand each other. Abel is paired with Double Dare, a witty look at the life of female stunt players.

On Saturday, Standing in the Shadows of Motown producer Allan Slutsky hosts an overview of "Docs That Rock," with clips from a handful of classics and a complete screening of Charlotte Zwerin's wonderful Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser (7 p.m., Connelly Auditorium, University of the Arts). And on Sunday, as part of the panel "Inheriting the Holy Land," Control Room producer Julia Bacha will show excerpts from her new Encounter Point, which attempts to find common ground between Jewish and Palestinian victims of political violence.

A Family Finds Entertainment (Sat., June 10, 8:30 p.m., $6, Vox Populi Gallery, 1315 Cherry St., fourth floor) Ryan Trecartin's 41-minute video, the centerpiece and title track of this weekend's Small Change program, is so frenetic, blithering and aggressively stylized, someone was bound to mistake it for genius. And they have, at least if its inclusion in this year's Whitney Biennial and an Artforum rave from Dennis Cooper are any indication. Family's most obvious predecessors are the circa 1963 movies of Jack Smith (Flaming Creatures) and Ron Rice (The Queen of Sheba Meets the Atom Man), films that document a subculture as much as an individual artist's vision. The trouble is, at least compared to Smith and Rice, Trecartin doesn't have very interesting friends. In essence, watching A Family Finds Entertainment is like being stuck at a costume party with a bunch of aggressively drunk art students who are dying to demonstrate how nonconformist they are. Trecartin himself plays half a dozen roles, most prominently a gay teenager with blacked-out teeth and the world's worst Southern accent, who's fond of saying things like, "I believe that somewhere, there's something worth dying for, and I think it's amazing."

Also on the bill is Dena DeCola and Karin E. Wandner's Five More Minutes, a discomfiting quasi-doc in which Wandner assumes the role of DeCola's recently deceased mother. Appearing as a younger version of herself, DeCola attempts to role-play a string of childhood memories, but she's clearly unable to contain her grief, even as she uses it to pressure her surrogate mother to transgress agreed-upon boundaries. (When her childlike self can't cajole Wandner to get in the tub with her, DeCola breaks character just long enough to say, "Karin, please.") If the exercise's therapeutic value is questionable, the purpose of filming it remains obscure, although there are hints that the whole enterprise is less spontaneous than it might appear; when DeCola makes an apparently spur-of-the-moment decision to bolt for the bedroom, the camera is hiding under the sheets with her. Undeniably moving, Five More Minutes is disturbing in ways it may not intend, reflecting a culture in which no experience is real unless lived in front of a lens.

Misc. Picks: Andrew's Video Vault goes Sondheim with Something for Everyone, Evening Primrose and the delightful documentary Original Cast Album: Company (Thu., June 8, 8 p.m., The Rotunda). The Franklin Institute's summer-long animation festival (every Friday at 8 p.m.) features experimental work by Oskar Fischinger, Robert Breer and others.

(sam@citypaper.net)